This is the first in a series of posts for my capstone assignment for INF2186: Metadata Schemas and Applications, a graduate course taught by Prof. Lynne Howarth in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Over the remainder of the semester, I will be blogging about my past and present experiences working with metadata, something I have spent a lot of time thinking about over the last ten years.
My first part-time job in highschool was in a photolab. Despite being an entirely boring photographer, I was a decent photo printer, and spent much of the next seven years working in photo shops in downtown Toronto, until I was ultimately laid off in 2006 thanks to the near total eclipse of the film industry by digital photography. For the first few years I worked both the counter and machines, and was responsible for the intake of thousands and thousands of rolls of film and other photographic orders, with each task deposited into its own paper envelope. Each of these envelopes required a methodical recording of both the necessary instructions and the identifying details of what was dropped off, allowing the company to better search for the submitted original. The metadata schema for photo processing required we record a customer’s name and phone number, the ISO, format, exposure count, and polarity of the medium dropped off, and the size and quantity of prints required. Customers were given a receipt with a unique identifier pertaining to their order at the end of the transaction. I compulsively filled out all of the fields on my envelopes, instead of leaving a note to look at the customers’ other orders for instructions, and later committed keyboard shortcuts, prices, and service SKUs to memory. As a printer, I really appreciated when others attended to filling these forms out. When it came to filling out these envelopes, I didn’t realize my obsessive tendencies would instill good habits in my metadata-filled future…